[Argus25]

One thing about Tesla and the era he lived in with his early work, electricity and the harnessing of electrical energy to do work was relatively new.

Tesla himself also provided some spectacular demonstrations of high voltage discharges with him sitting by on a chair inside a large cage. Even movie makers of the time were captivated with what electricity might be able to do and the ideas were incorporated into many revisions of the story of Doctor Frankenstein and movies such as Metropolis. The idea being that lightening like electricity could re-animate the dead. (Ironically this partly came true with the defibrillator but of course the person is not actually dead yet).

Even some Quack doctors of the time got into various forms of electric therapy with glowing gas discharge tubes stroked over people's bodies.

At the time though, with demonstrations of gas discharge tubes lighting up, with no wires connected to them, it would not have been a hard sell at all to suggest transmission of energy in large quantities. But as pointed out, we now know it is impractical to power homes and has very limited utility for the suggested application.

I often wondered why Tesla himself, who was very good at maths and physics and an outstanding & creative AC electrical engineer would have even suggested such a notion. Also he remarked about Edison that an ounce of theory would have saved him a pound of hard work, a typical remark from somebody good at theory.

Later I did think of one reason why Tesla might have advocated the energy transmission idea. Around the time that Tesla's transmitting system for worldwide communications was being tested (and he did manage to detect a signal 30 miles away, his system now thought to be a very lossy radio transmitter with 99% ground currents) Marconi successfully pulled of the transatlantic radio transmission and Tesla's funding got cut.

So Tesla would have been in desperate need of funding and he may, in desperation, have put forward the wireless transmission of energy notion as a project to be funded with plans to use the money for more useful work. I find it very difficult to believe that someone of his technical acumen could have actually believed in it himself.